…portrait of donuts as couch potatoes
After a full round of housecleaning and more furniture moving, I rewarded myself this weekend by settling in with some personal knitting. My Donutty Basic Chic Hoodie is now only missing a Sleeve (and whatever I’m going to do with the neck, hee.)
Now if you’ve been visiting here for awhile, you know I have a love/hate relationship with knitting sleeves in the round, especially on top-down sweaters. But somewhere along the line (needle type? yarn? design?) this vaporized on this one and I just kicked it! Of course, this is just Stockinette stitch so that goes like the wind on #7 needles but I think I was visualizing this as a big old sock leg because there were about the same amount of stitches as my favorite sock pattern. I’ve also learned to just calm down and rest the body of the piece in my lap and flick the sleeve back and forth while stitching (doing it Magic Loop style with one needle.) For the record, I rarely use a super-long needle to MLoop; usually a 32″ for sweaters and (!) 24″ (Inox Teflon) for socks. After a couple of rounds the needle cables conform to a tighter radius and I’m convinced it goes much faster than the super lengths (speedier pull-through, less wrestling with the cable).
The little Donut detailing came out very pretty after a nice little steam fest with the iron. The entire piece was lightly steam pressed from the wrong side, barely touching it with the iron. Then it was time for a little portrait, but if you’ve ever taken pictures of dark or black knitting you know it is wicked!
So I hacked my camera!
Lazy Girl Photography: I usually take pictures for the blog with a point & shoot camera (so fast) but I was going to try and use my oooooold Canon Digital Rebel (first model ever) with a lens I had that had a pretty big aperture (1.4 Prime Sigma 30mm EX — a lense many people are nutty about on these cameras). I love natural light and this time of year, there is a softness to the air and this would really capture it!
But the problem was I wasn’t interested in using extra lights or even a regular flash so you could see the cables. That is: 1. Time Consuming; & 2. Might wash out part of the picture and leave the rest in the Cave. BUT, my little point & shoot Canon has a function where you can dial-down the strength of the flash and I searched around online and found a firmware Hack that would make ye old Rebel behave! :)
This was very wicked and exciting because I didn’t know if the new function would even work or if the camera would even turn back on after I replaced it’s brain!!! But no pain no gain and this camera is seriously out of warranty so I went for it.
The Hack commanded a button (Jump) that was assigned to something else and now I could ramp up and down the built-in camera flash to make a Fill Flash.
I think it worked pretty well! (This might still look a little dark on your monitor; sometimes the default computer system settings are a little dark and I always set the contrast and brightness higher to pop the photography I see on the web. Try it, you might like it!)
So now it’s on the sleeve #2 and drumroll please, the Winner of the Freebie Friday 2 yarn…
Thanks everyone for playing and please remember to !!!!
Done and done!
The sweater is beautiful and I have some black yarn just sitting and waiting! I wondered if the cables would get lost (thinking Twist potentially) but I guess not. Voting duty complete!
I went and voted first thing this morning. I got to the polling place right after 7 a.m. and there was a decent line. Now it is just crossing the fingers for the rest of the day!
I love how the hoodie is turning out with that beautiful donutty cable.
I voted last week with a mail-in ballot and I am thrilled, thrilled, thrilled, with the results!